re: #161 Backwoods_Sleuth

Martha was the Nixon Administration’s worst inside nightmare.

Wiki fills in for me (I have three excuses, which can be filled in later)

[…]The Mitchells separated in 1973. After the Watergate break-in, Martha Mitchell began contacting reporters when her husband’s role in the scandal became known, which earned her the title Martha the Mouth, or “the Mouth of the South.”[citation needed] Nixon was later to tell interviewer David Frost in 1977 that Martha was a distraction to John Mitchell, such that no one was minding the store, and “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have been no Watergate.”

At one point, she insisted she had been held against her will in a California hotel room and sedated[1] to prevent her from making controversial phone calls to the news media. Because of her allegations, she was discredited and even abandoned by most of her family, except her son Jay. Nixon aides even leaked to the press that she had a “drinking problem”.[citation needed] The “Martha Mitchell effect”, in which a psychiatrist mistakenly or purposely identifies a patient’s extraordinary claims as delusions, despite their veracity, was later named after her.[…]